Eternal and Motionless – China

Shaojie Huang

Language Expert

Shaojie Huang is a Language Expert for Translated and supports the localization practice of Airbnb to make it available to simplified Chinese users around the world. Shaojie translates between English and Chinese. For 20 years he has worked in subtitling, publishing, and travel and hospitality–to promote communication across languages and cultures. He wrote for the New York Times about conservation and animal rights activism in China for five years when he lived in Beijing before the pandemic. Shaojie performs Beijing Opera and Kunqu (sometimes to a live audience) in his spare time.

Overview

–Country: China
– Key Concepts: Temporal direction, cyclical history, 来 (coming), 往 (gone), 未来 (yet to come), dynastic cycles, metaphysical vantage point
– Temporal Orientation: Cyclical yet directional; relative to human and metaphysical perspectives
– Historical Influences: Confucian moral thought, historiography, writing systems, Buddhism, Western ideas

Introduction

The ancient Chinese did not have a word for “future” until the arrival of Buddhism. Before that, what we would call the future was expressed through relative temporal distances from the present and through spatial or directional metaphors. This offers a fascinating window into how the Chinese historically imagined time—not as a line stretching endlessly forward, but as a network of directions, relationships, and cycles, intertwined with moral, historical, and metaphysical thinking.

Early Spatialization of Time

The fact that, before Buddhism entered China, the future was just referred to (correctly) in terms of any specific amount of time away from the present, helps to get a glimpse into how ancient Chinese spatialized the future by using positional or directional words for time.

For example, while celebrating the long-lasting influence of moral exemplars, Mencius (372–289 BC) said, “one hundred generations downward, they still inspire those who hear their stories.” It’s likely that Mencius said “downward” because people in his time wrote from top to bottom, which made it intuitive to imagine time as going in that direction as well. About 200 years after Mencius, Sima Qian, the great historiographer, said his work looked at a grand span of time that began “up from Xuanyuan [the semi-god king] down to the present.” Time, again, moved in the same direction as he penned his immortal classic on the bamboo slips.

However, it’s important to remember that “down” isn’t the only spatial adverb they used when talking about the future. And the writing habit is just one of many possible ways to inspire an imagination of time. One of the earliest, and perhaps most used, words is 后. In terms of space, it means “rearward” or “posterior,” but in oracle bone script around the 2nd millennium B.C., the word was also used to mean “later in time.” In another historical record, a man warned his king against making peace with a newly defeated enemy: “Give them 10 years to raise their young and another 10 to train their soldiers. Twenty years out, they will lay waste to our country.” The future isn’t just in one place or one direction. Instead, it’s somewhere either “down” or “out” or “back” there. And it’s coming.

Temporal Language and Conceptualization

Another way the Chinese perceived time is to refer to the future as something that was coming (来), whereas the past was something that had left (往). A day in the future was 来日, “the day that’s coming.” The next year was 来年, “the year that’s coming.”

Which is why it was really brilliant when the 4th century translators came up with the word (which is still in use today) for “future” in the Buddhist concept of “the three times.” 未来 literally means “yet to come.” But to whom or what is the future coming? If the position or direction of time is relative to a vantage point, what would that point be for the ancient Chinese? Well, “the year that’s coming” is coming to us as we will still be here (most likely) next year, but the ancient Chinese must have known that, on a larger scale, they would have been long gone by the time a remote future had come. So again, to whom or what would that future have been coming?

Somewhere in their consciousness, they may have imagined something eternal and motionless, relative to everything and everyone swimming in the river of time. And that was their metaphysical point zero. The future pulled ever closer to it, while the past pulled ever farther away. Dynasties came and went. People were born, lived, and then died, joining those that had come and gone before them. All relative to that point. At least that’s one plausible way to look at it.

Cyclical Time and Modern Transformation

Unlike the Christian tradition, the ancient Chinese didn’t seem to entertain an idea of history coming to an end. Instead, history was and always would be an infinite string of dynasties, one rising out of the ashes of another. The known world would forever repeat its cycle, going from one united political entity to falling apart into belligerent factions that fight until one triumphs to bring all the broken pieces back together again.

Until, that is, a completely different civilization showed up on their doorstep in the 1800s, yanking them out of their time loop. “For the first time in millennia,” said Li Hongzhang, a Chinese statesman of the time, “things are different.” Things have been different in many ways since China started letting in Western ideas, including different ways of imagining time or even the end of the universe, as the writer Liu Cixin did in his award-winning science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem.

Are they out of their good old time loop, though? That should be the topic for another time, and maybe only time can tell.

Conclusion

For the ancient Chinese, the future was never a distant, abstract horizon, but a directional and relational concept, intertwined with writing, morality, history, and metaphysics. With Buddhism, the linguistic concept 未来 emerged, creating a framework for considering what is yet to come. While dynastic cycles emphasized the infinite repetition of time, encounters with Western thought introduced new temporal perspectives, blending cyclical tradition with linear futurity. Today, the Chinese imagination of the future continues to navigate these overlapping temporalities, balancing ancestral continuity with modern transformations.

未来安在？ 

古代中国人本来没有今天意义上的“未来”一词。魏晋时期的翻译家设法翻译佛教的”三世“概念， 于是有了”未来“。在那之前的古籍中，更常见的表达是把未来描述为一段时间之后、之外，或者之 下。对于今天的话题来说，这正好给了我们一个方便的切入点，让我们一窥古人的时空观念。 

比如孟子在赞叹圣人的道德感召力时，是这样说的：”百世之下，闻者莫不兴起“。 

孟子把百世之后的未来”定位“为百世之”下“，也许和古人自上而下的书写和阅读习惯有关。基于这 种习惯，把时间的行进方向想象为自上而下，也是比较顺理成章的。

类似的例子有很多。孟子之后大约二百年，司马迁在介绍《史记》的时间跨度时说：”上记轩辕，下 至于兹“。也是把过去定位在”上“，把后世定位在”下“。 

但我们需要注意，”下“并不是古人对未来的唯一定位；书写和阅读习惯也不是有可能影响人类时 空观的唯一因素。 

比如最常用可能也最古老的一个词：“后”。用于空间时，意思是“向后”或“位于后部”。但甲骨文中，” 后“字就已经有了表示”先后“的用法。 

又比如，与孟子基本同时代的《左传》就这样记载伍员警告吴王夫差提防越国的那句名言：”越十 年生聚，十年教训，二十年之外，吴其为沼乎！“ 

所以未来并不只有一个方位或者方向。它可以在”下“，也可以在”外“，当然还可以在“后”。 而且未来是走在”来“着的路上的。 

古人的另外一种时间表述方式，是把未来的人和事表述为”来者“，而把过去表述为”往者“。明天 （或未来的某一天）是”来日“，明年是”来年“。 

说到这里，我们必须佩服那些佛经译者找到了”未来“这个词，既贴近佛教的表述方式，又符合中国 人一贯对未来的想象。 

但这时候就有了一个问题。既然未来是要“来”的，那么它是在朝着谁或什么而来？如果时间的方 位或行进方向是相对于某个参照点而言的，那么古人观念中的那个参照点是什么？当然，”来年 “是朝着我们而来的，因为大概率我们明年还会在这里。但是更远的未来呢？古人一定知道，当一 个更远的未来到来时，他们早已不在，所以我们还是不禁要问，一个比较遥远的未来是在朝着谁 来呢？ 

也许，在古人的意识里，有那么一个永恒且固定不动的东西，以它为参照，时间的长流以及它所裹 挟的一切人和事，源源不断涌来，又不可挽回地流走？未来不断逼近，过去渐行渐远。王朝兴替， 人事代谢。也许一切都是相对那个原点而言，就像坐标轴上的零点？ 

至少这是一种可能的猜想吧。 

与基督教的传统不同，中国古人似乎不太相信历史有一个终点。在他们那里，历史永远是王朝更 替，永远是”分久必合，合久必分“，一遍一遍的轮回而已。 

直到十九世纪一个完全不同的文明出现在自家门口，把困在历史轮回里的中国狠狠拉了一把。李 鸿章说当时的中国面临”数千年未有之变局“，毫不夸张。 

自那以来，西风东渐（有时候不是自愿的），中国在很多方面的确有改变。这其中也包括时间观念 ，以及对未来乃至于宇宙终点的想象（比如《三体》）。

那么中国是否走出了那个古老的轮回呢？这个问题需要另找“时间”讨论，也可能只有“时间”才能 回答。